Joseph E. Burlett wanted to learn Spanish, but his twice-weekly language classes at Brookdale Community College weren’t doing the job. The classes were too short, he says, and he wasn’t practicing enough on his own. When an extra session a week with a tutor wasn’t helping either, his professor suggested he take an intensive language course in a Spanish-speaking country.
Mr. Burlett, 24, who works 40 hours a week at a local sheriff’s office while attending Brookdale, in New Jersey, had never traveled overseas before — or even considered it. But once he got an unpaid leave from his job, and the college helped him arrange financial aid to cover part of the trip’s cost, he packed his bags. This past summer, he spent five weeks studying Spanish and Ecuadorean history through a program Brookdale runs in Guayaquil, Ecuador.
Brookdale is one of a growing number of two-year colleges that are pushing more students to study abroad — earning credits while taking college-run or approved courses overseas. In doing so, the colleges are putting a new stamp on a practice that has long been associated almost exclusively with four-year institutions.
A smattering of study-abroad options for community-college students has been available for decades, but in recent years, dozens of two-year institutions have begun concerted efforts to increase opportunities for overseas course work. To accommodate their students, who are typically pressed for time and money, community colleges are offering programs that are shorter, less expensive, and more flexible than the traditional full semester or yearlong programs run by four-year institutions. Community colleges are also branching out to include programs in academic areas, like nursing, not usually included in study-abroad curricula. And they are putting extra effort into helping students obtain scholarships and other financial assistance to make the trips possible.
The number of two-year-college students studying abroad has been rising slowly — nearly 5,800 went in the 2003-4 academic year, the latest for which data are available — but that number still represents only 3 percent of the roughly 200,000 college students who study abroad each year, according to the Institute of International Education, in New York. And it is a drop in the bucket when compared with the millions who attend community colleges each year.
Community-college officials who are eager to raise participation in study-abroad programs say they face not only practical challenges — many of their students have work and family responsibilities, for example — but intangible ones, too. Too often, they say, students are not aware of the option to study abroad, or they simply dismiss the idea.
“So many of our students have not been on a train that takes them outside of New Jersey or New York,” says Emily Hagadorn, who headed Brookdale’s International Center for 10 years. “It’s a huge emotional leap to have them think they can spend three months in China.”
Even more frustrating, some community-college officials say, is the lack of support from administrators concerned about the cost of such programs. And some governing-board members believe the programs lie outside the mission of community colleges, many of which were created to serve the needs of a local work force.
“Some people need to be reminded that our community is our world, and we need to prepare students for a global community,” says Mary Ellen Duncan, president of Howard Community College, in Maryland. “It can be a sensitive issue when you have to decide where to put limited resources, but study abroad is a legitimate and increasingly critical activity of any college.” Ms. Duncan, whose institution sent 175 students overseas last year, and her like-minded community-college colleagues are swimming along with a strong tide throughout academe that favors creating more study-abroad opportunities for all American college students.
Their efforts may even get a lift from Congress, if it passes an authorization bill pending in the Senate that would open the way for millions of dollars more in federal financial aid for study abroad. The idea for the legislation, introduced in July, came from a bipartisan group of lawmakers, educators, and foreign-policy experts known as the Lincoln Commission. Its goal is to get one million college students — including at least 30,000 from community colleges — to study abroad each year within the next 10 years.
To reach those numbers, says M. Peter McPherson, a former president of Michigan State University who is chairman of the Lincoln Commission, two-year institutions need to continue to introduce a variety of study-abroad options.
“If community colleges up north are looking for a cheaper way for students to be immersed in the French language, they should consider a program in Quebec,” he says, noting that it is much more expensive to travel to France than to Canada. “The length, type, and destinations of programs can be experimented with. There are many ways to offer useful experiences.”
The Community College of Philadelphia is planning to put together a short program in Puerto Rico, a Spanish-speaking destination close enough to help students save on airfare. And next summer the college will run a one-month program in London designed to help keep students in what the college’s study-abroad coordinator, Christopher DiCapua, calls their “comfort zone.” Two courses on geography and environmental sciences will be based on comparisons between London and Philadelphia, examining, for example, the similarities and differences between the cities’ transit systems.
“We have so many students that maybe have never left Philadelphia, so in asking them to leave the country, we think it would be helpful, attractive for them, to have a curriculum that brings a piece of Philadelphia along with them,” says Mr. DiCapua, who also heads the college’s foreign-language department.
At the College of DuPage, in Glen Ellyn, Ill., officials are trying to bridge the psychological gap between community-college students and the idea of studying abroad by informing students and their parents earlier about such opportunities. For the first time last year, study-abroad organizers participated in a recruiting fair that the college holds annually for local high-school juniors and seniors.
“We have a much shorter window to get the information out and to get students on these programs,” says Zinta Konrad, DuPage’s director of international education. “We have to plant the seed early, and do a little hand-holding with parents, so they can get comfortable with and plan for the idea of studying abroad, something they might not have ever thought about.”
Once students and their parents are sold on the benefits of international experience, one of the biggest hurdles is money. But while few students think they can afford a study-abroad program, Ms. Konrad says, there is usually a way to make it work through a combination of scholarships and financial-aid packages.
At DuPage, a faculty committee raises up to $6,000 annually for students to use for study-abroad expenses through a variety of creative fund-raising techniques. The committee organizes lectures, such as one it is planning on African drumming to coincide with a campus visit by a musical group from Burundi, and runs an annual taffy-apple sale around Halloween.
Howard Community College has about $13,000 in grant money available for students studying abroad each year from several endowments established by staff members and donors. And at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, as much as $90,000 of money collected from student-activity fees is available to help pay students’ study-abroad bills.
Community-college students are also eligible for national grantsfor example, from the U.S. Department of State’s Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship program, which awards up to $5,000 to each student to defray study-abroad costs. Last year 27 community-college students received Gilman scholarships, up from 18 the previous year and more than five times the number in 2001.
But even where money might be available, other snags may impede students’ travel plans.
Manhattan canceled its four-week program in the Dominican Republic this past summer because too few students signed up. Segundo Pantoja, director of the college’s Center for Ethnic Studies, says that at least two students who showed interest could not go because they were unable to arrange child care during their absence.
“They asked me if they could bring their small children along,” Mr. Pantoja says. “Two-thirds of our students are female, and many of them have kids. Our population is from a relatively low socioeconomic background and so money is one factor, but family and work responsibilities may be even bigger ones.”
Mr. Burlett, the Brookdale student, says he feels fortunate to have gotten a leave from work. Since he lives with his parents while he goes to school, he says he has been able, with a little belt-tightening, to make up for his lost wages. In all, he says, the planning and budgeting have been worth it.
He returned from Ecuador with a better command of Spanish, and thoughts about starting a security business there. Most important, says Mr. Burlett, he came home with some much-needed perspective.
“There are so many people who go to work and school and think the whole world is where they grew up,” he says. “I can tell them it is definitely not.”
http://chronicle.com Section: Community Colleges Volume 53, Issue 10, Page B10
